The SendSocial logo

I turned into Color-Man and created a few schemes. As a designer, you’re in the superior role to manipulate people according to your own opinion. If you like one logo and think it’s the best, just make the other logos look boring… of cause, I would dream of doing that, but I must admit that I made a few ugly ones to make the good ones stand out (don’t tell the other guys ). Take a look for yourself:

A logo… it means more than you think. Can you, standing on one foot, explain to me what exactly a logo is, and what all the glamour is good for? At first I could barely mention a thing besides “color” and “shape”, and I’m the designer on this team, Christ!

Anyway, I looked in our dictionary, and as usual it has a pretty neat explanation:

A logo is a graphical element (ideogram, symbol, emblem, icon, sign) that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand. Typically, a logo’s design is for immediate recognition.[1] The logo is one aspect of a company’s commercial brand, or economic or academic entity, and its shapes, colors, fonts, and images usually are different from others in a similar market. Logos are also used to identify organizations and other non-commercial entities.
Wikipedia – “Logo”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo

Now, one thing is the final result and the importance of it, another thing is the process of creating an “aspect of a company’s commercial brand”. A process can be long or short, and if I were to describe our logo creation process, I would describe it to be a bit longer than expected, since the final logo has been through a lot of thoughts, previews, colors, shapes and considerations; which I guess is pretty standard procedure anyway. Not that we’re not happy about the outcome, we really are – time well spent.

I went through my SendSocial-inbox, and I found some words of inspiration, among our frequent discussions, describing our needs for the logo. 1½ month ago we wanted a logo with arrows (symbolizing logistics), some kind of social element or icon in it (since using our service requires action from both sides), and at the end we wanted the “S” to play a certain role.

My first attempt, with inspiration from @antonystevenson, was this one:

People thought “Okay, that is nice…”, but we weren’t looking for a “Okay, that is nice…”-logo. Giving the S and the arrows a second look, you’ll immediately think of the devil’s tale and

a certain object I don’t want to explain any further (@tombeckenham – team member, SendSocial)

Therefore it was requested that we continued our journey towards an acceptable logo, which I’m very happy we did. I sketched a bit which resulted in following logos:

Looking at these was a start. I mean, we had only considered one logo, so having 4 of them gave inspiration for new thoughts. The clever eye might notice some social elements in the first one, and some in the other ones, but we were not convinced that any of these logos would do what it would take to become the breathtaking “SendSocial Logo” (wow!). We spent a conference call brainstorming, and I grabbed my pencil and paper whereas I began my trip to the lands of logos. The next round of logos was… multifarious in some way.

I sent these around, and we all agreed that inverted arrows were THE thing we had been looking for. With help from Antony, I came up with the following logo, which we decided to be our final one (in black & white):

Now, a polished logo in black & white is cool, useful and (hopefully) recognizable. When you’re making logos for web applications the first part of the process is finished when you got yourself a b/w logo. Upcoming is part two which includes colors and color schemes, and it can now and then be a war in itself to find the right set of colors. I kept my mind positive though, I have worked with these guys for a while now, and no matter what decision we need to make, it WILL be made.

I turned into Color-Man and created a few schemes. As a designer, you’re in the superior role to manipulate people according to your own opinion. If you like one logo to be the best, just make the other ones look boring… of cause, I would never dream of doing that, but I must admit that I made a few less beautiful ones to make the good ones stand out (shh! don’t tell the other guys). Take a look for yourself:

By now you know a little about the SendSocial logo, and my intentions are not to keep you here forever so I’ll make it short. After the color schemes had been sent around we decided to go with the pink/blue scheme (might as well call it the “the Flickr scheme”), but we wanted a few modifications to it. Furthermore, a few ideas from Antony led to another set of schemes, and the last preview I sent the team was this one:

Everyone agreed that one of those would fit SendSocial, but we chose the blue/green logo because WE think it has funkyness, a corporate touch and great colors for the website (speaking of harmony and balance).

So, now you know the story of the SendSocial logo, which in my eyes, fought brave battles and finally reached victory, to the delight for everyone. May it live long and last forever.

Thanks for reading, take care – @marcfalk